In 2012, public cloud services generated over $40 B in revenue, expected to grow to $100 B annual revenue by 2016. Modern cloud services provide data accessibility from multiple desktop and mobile platforms and devices and integration with other applications and services. Many popular cloud services are positioned as cloud platforms. Thus, Dropbox and Box OneCloud offer developer tools and APIs for integrating third party applications and services with consumer and enterprise grade cloud storage platforms; the Evernote API and its Trunk marketplace are parts of a universal memory platform, which counted, as of June, 2013, over 450 published third party integrations, around 2,000 applications in production and over 20,000 active developers. In addition to integrations with their own platforms, new cloud services are increasingly offering interoperability with products from established players, including prominent social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, to name a few. The ecosystem of interconnected cloud services and associated desktop and mobile application spaces on different software platforms (Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, etc.) integrated with those services is becoming increasingly complex; it requires efficient development and maintenance.
Users receive maximal benefit from cloud services when data exchange between various software components of a cloud platform is as seamless and transparent as possible. This requirement creates a series of challenging and multifaceted tasks due to the broad range of supported data formats and their creation, rendering and editing needs. This is especially true for cloud services that may have their own rich and editable standard, or main data formats shared between service's core client software applications. Normally, a cloud service's native data format is consistently rendered on each software platform where such client software is offered. New data may arrive from the service's own client applications after they are created by users according to their needs, in which case the data automatically comply with service's core rendering and editing guidelines. However, new user data may also arrive from external sources; for example, user data may be created in additional software applications that do not belong to the core suite of cloud service's client applications. Such external applications may be developed by the service vendor or by third parties and interoperate with the service via existing integration methods. Incorporation of such external data assumes either their conversion to service's standard format or encapsulation of such data as attachments that require special non-standard-client applications to render and/or edit the data. When the data is distributed across the service and is accessible by diverse applications, data editing may also occur at different levels and the data should remain unbroken and accessible across the service and its software space.
There is a broad range of partial authoring and rendering options available for a particular external data object created outside of the cloud service's standard client set. On the near side of the spectrum is application data created in a service-friendly format. For example, a portion of HTML content of a simple web page delivered to the Evernote service via its web clipper application may be easily converted into the service's standard format and thus becomes both viewable and editable in place, that is, by the service's own client software. On the far side of the range are complex multi-component data in binary, XML or other textual or combined formats, created in specialized applications (such as advanced mind-mapping, video editing, CAD, presentation or other industrial software). Sometimes, these types of data may be converted into a cloud service's main format with a simplified presentation layer for rendering, say, in HTML. However, such simplified conversions may deny full or even partial editing and may require keeping editable data files as attachments for opening them in the original authoring applications or in other software that is aware of the full data format. In the middle of the spectrum are authoring software applications which, similarly to Evernote Food or Evernote Hello software, create data compatible with a cloud service's main data format. Such data can be fully rendered and partially edited in service's client applications; however, full editing in the basic client software is risky, because it may break unique data layouts, formats and dependencies specific for the custom applications (for example, the sequence, size and disposition of fields in a contact form) and damage data consistency when the data is re-accessed by the original application after it was edited in the client software.
Accordingly, it is desirable to develop adequate methods and processes for cross-application data sharing and editing within a cloud platform or as part of other multi-application systems.